Miranda Jarrett - Gift Of The Heart

He sighed, glancing up the ladder to where the boy had disappeared. “By my lights, you needed a bit of help.”

Rachel bristled. “I assure you Billy’s not usually so ill-mannered.”

“Ill-mannered or high-spirited, it’s all the same to mamas, isn’t it?” he said. “I was a boy once myself, and it doesn’t take too much to remember how it was.”

He was still leaning on his rifle, kneeling at her feet in a way that she found oddly unsettling. Because she had taken his own shirt to clean and mend, he was wearing an old shirt of William’s, the too-short sleeves turned up over his thick-boned wrists, and that disconcerted her, too. The shirt belonged to her husband, she reminded herself fiercely, yet still she noticed how the worn cambric strained to cover the unfamiliar shoulders beneath it, and tried not to look at the triangle of dark, curling hair framed by the shirt’s open throat.

“You haven’t been a boy for a good long time,” she said, and immediately flushed guiltily, realizing too late how she’d as much as confessed her indecent observations. Lord, how bold would the man think she was? “That is, Mr. Ryder, I meant there’s a world of difference between you and Billy.”

He nodded, saying nothing more. Beneath the ragged growth of beard he might have been smiling up at her, and at her expense, too.

“You don’t have to stay there on the floor, you know,” she said stiffly, her cheeks still on fire. “You can stand now.”

“I’m not sure I can.” What she’d feared was a smile turned into more of a grimace as he tried to push himself back up to his feet. “Seems I’m fit for little more than impressing boys.”

“Oh— oh! ” Rachel hurried to his side, slipping her shoulder beneath his arm to help guide him across the room to the bed, then darted back to bring him a cup of water.

“How thoughtless I’ve been!” she said contritely as she watched him drink. “You must forgive me, please, for—”

“Ask yourself for forgiveness, not me,” he said sharply, his eyes suddenly snapping despite the pallor of his face. “Consider what your brother-in-law must have told you about me. Your sympathy could have cost you your life, coming so close to me like that. You should have kept your musket until I’d given up my rifle.”

“Oh, bother and fuss! As if I put any stock in what Alec tells me!” Rachel tossed her head indignantly. “I decide my own mind. You’d never have walked two steps without my help.”

“And that’s two times this day alone that your deciding’s made you careless,” he said relentlessly. “If you want to go on living by yourself out here, you’ll have to do better.”

“While you, sir, would do better to learn gratitude to those who help you.” With an angry flurry of her skirts, Rachel turned her back to him and returned to her neglected baking. Left so long, the dough on the table had begun to rise into a lopsided lump toward the warmth of the open hearth, and with her fist she smacked it down.

Watching her, Jamie swore softly and leaned back against the headboard. He hadn’t meant to be so hard on her like that, but she had been dangerously trusting, both with him and the man she said was her husband’s brother. He’d rather make her angry than keep silent.

Absently he ran his fingers back and forth along the rifle’s barrel. He wondered how she’d come to this little log house, where she was as out of place as the gilded bull’s-eye mirror hanging over the crude stone fireplace. Her speech, her self-assurance, even her cheerfully ignorant trust, belonged in some elegant city parlor, not here. He remembered the wealthy daughters and wives of merchants he’d seen riding in their carriages through the Philadelphia streets—beautiful, expensive women in rich imported silk and kerseymere. She’d been born one of them; even the rough linsey-woolsey skirts she wore now couldn’t hide that. But what kind of fool of a husband would bring a gently bred lady like her to the wilderness?

She was putting her whole body—and her anger—into thumping the dough, bending over the table far enough to give him a clear view of her ankles, neat and trim even in woolen stockings. Humiliating though it had been to ask for her help, he’d learned again how softly curved her body felt against his, how readily she fit against him, and he’d learned that she found him attractive, too. He’d seen that shy but eager interest in the eyes of women enough times before to recognize it, though the devil only knew how she’d feel that way when he must look like a scarecrow complete with a mouth full of straw. Perhaps, he thought wryly, she had been alone too long.

But was that reason enough for her to have shielded him from her husband’s brother the way she had?

“How much did your brother-in-law tell you?” he asked softly.

Her back stiffened, but she didn’t turn to face him. “I told you already that I don’t heed what Alec says.”

“I didn’t ask you what you believed. I asked how much he told you.”

She swung around, her black brows drawing downward at being challenged. “He told me, Mr. Ryder, that you are one of the Tory Rangers serving under Colonel Walter Butler.”

His expression didn’t change. “As I recall, your husband fights with the rebel army. I’ll warrant that makes me your enemy as well as his.”

She raised her chin with the same stubbornness he’d seen in the boy. “At present you are a man who needed my assistance. You’ve trouble enough without me turning you away into the snow on account of your politics.”

“I’m caught in my enemy’s territory with the wind whistling through the hole in my shoulder.” His mouth twisted bleakly. “Oh, aye, that’s trouble enough.”

“Not quite.” Rachel leaned closer, lowering her voice so Billy, doubtless eavesdropping overhead, wouldn’t hear. “It’s worse than that. Somehow you’ve managed to cross your Colonel Butler badly enough that he’s offering a bounty on your scalp. Twenty dollars, according to Alec.”

“Twenty dollars?” Jamie’s heart plummeted. He’d never dreamed Butler would offer such a reward. Twenty dollars would set every penniless rogue in the land on his trail.

Rachel nodded. “Twenty it was. Where money’s concerned, I’ve never had reason to doubt Alec.”

“But you doubt the rest?”

“I make my own decisions. I told you that already, too.” She noticed how he’d neither denied nor confirmed Alec’s story, and she wondered uneasily whether she’d been wrong to trust him as much as she had. As he’d told her himself, he was her enemy. “Whether it’s twenty dollars or forty pieces of silver, Mr. Ryder, I’m not in the habit of putting a price on any man’s life.”

“Thank you.” It didn’t seem enough for what she’d done, but he was afraid that anything more would sound false. “And the name’s Jamie Ryder, without the trappings. You can save the ‘sirs’ and ‘misters’ for the next gentleman who wanders into your barn.”

But Rachel didn’t smile, considering instead the easy familiarity he was proposing as she turned back toward her work table. There were already too few barriers between them, crowded together like this in her home’s single room, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to give up the fragile formality of that “mister.”

He waited, puzzled by her silence. “There, now,” he said gruffly. “I’ve handed you leave to call me by my given name, but it seems instead I’ve offered you some sort of offense.”

“Oh, no, it’s not that,” said Rachel hastily as she moved to the hearth to lift the iron pot with their supper closer to the coals. She lifted the lid of the pot to stir the contents while she thought, brushing her hand briskly before her face against the rush of fragrant steam. His insistence on no formal title might have another, very different explanation. She could know for certain, if she dared risk making a fool of herself.